


A little more blue

by Adox



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Mentions of sex work, all that nice ol klaus stuff, emotionally constipated bro bonding, obviously, takes place a few years before the show starts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-07 20:28:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17967512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adox/pseuds/Adox
Summary: The water ran over his face, cold but familiar, dripping onto the collar of his shirt and through to his chest. Klaus stared into the mirror, which he hadn’t done in a while, to see a skeleton. Pale and uninspired, it was ironic really, how he looked more like a corpse than his posse of ever annoying spirits.Ah, Klaus, I knew him well, Horatio.----Diego finds Klaus on one of his drug busts, and Detective Patch puts him in charge of babysitting the witness. It's harder than it looks, what with the trauma and all.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm obsessed with the umbrella academy and wrote this at 1 AM in a fever dream. Comment if you want a part 2!!

 

Diego hoped that they weren’t bloodstains— or at the very least, that they weren’t _Klaus’s_ bloodstains. The bed was littered with them: varying in size, shape and color, dappling the coarse motel room sheets like an unfinished Jackson Pollock painting. Klaus was tangled in them, unconscious body limp and twisted over the bed with little grace, smelling like every back-alleyway people got stabbed in, or fucked in. Probably both.

 

            It had been a while since Diego had seen any of his siblings or family. After they left the Academy behind, in pursuit of other lies, Allison’s wedding was their only semblance of a reunion. Luther had yet to go on a moon trip, Vanya hadn’t written her book yet, and Diego was en-route to graduation from the Police Academy. Klaus showed up at the reception, late for the ceremony because he “got lost,” though no one missed the needle marks on his arms. It was a public wedding, attracting all sorts of press, so no one really interacted outside of those awkward, “oh right, we’re family” nods.

 

            So, he had an idea of what Klaus was up to. His brother had always had an affinity for drugs and impulsive decisions, which was probably why their father gave up so easily on him. Diego expected drugs, parties, whatever. He didn’t expect this.

 

            It was some dealer he was tracking after taking a quick, casual look over Patch’s suited shoulder during one of their heated, push-and-pull, “we’re aware that we have history and tension so let’s just never mention it” conversations. Some guy with tainted drugs and an affinity for sending people to the hospital. Naturally, Diego did some digging and found one of his hangouts. He also found his brother.

 

            After Diego entered the room, ready to stab whoever was lying in that bed, the knife slipped from his hand, clattering onto the floor as he went to feel for a pulse.

 

Klaus was always the gangly, pale brother. He always looked like he belonged in a Tim Burton movie, and always embraced it. For some reason, though, looking at him like this… it troubled Diego. His brother was all skin and bones, cheeks practically carved out with an ice-cream scoop; body dwarfed by his ratty black jacket. It was hard to distinguish Klaus’s veins from his tattoos, since they were so dark and blatant as they traversed his body.

 

            Diego was never close with Klaus. Then again, no one was close with Klaus (outside of Ben, though that didn’t matter anymore, did it?), too caught up in their own personal quests to care about someone that had given up on his. However, seeing his brother like this sent Diego into a fight or flight sort of response— except there was no one to fight, and he couldn’t just _leave_. He untangled Klaus from the sheets, wincing at the impossible constellation of track marks that trailed down his arms, and helped him into the clothes that he found scattered across the grimy tile floor, under the assumption that they were his.

 

            He wasn’t sure why Klaus was here, but he could imagine. Whether he came voluntarily for a cheap hit, or went kicking and screaming, neither answer satisfied Diego. The room smelt like piss and vomit, with a side of weed, and it all left him with a sick feeling in his stomach. _God_ , he hoped those weren’t bloodstains.

 

            Without much else to go on, and a brother on the brink of death, Diego picked up his knife, wiped it over his sleeve, and called an ambulance.

 

-

 

Klaus opened his eyes before the paramedics get there, and Diego perked up, no longer perusing through the room looking for some sort of evidence of who and what went on there. Klaus had these brilliant green irises that stood out against his pale complexion, Diego remembered Allison going on and on about how she was jealous of the color— however, now they seemed almost desaturated, pale and sporadic as they darted limply around the room. He was still caught up in whatever high he’d passed out to, Diego wasn’t even sure if his brother could see him, or form any sort of tangible thought process.

 

He didn’t even shift, but he took a desperate inhale as he regained consciousness, and Diego rushed to his side.

 

“Hey, hey,” Diego whispered, hands hovering over Klaus without making actual contact. “I’ve called some people, you’re gonna be ok. Okay?”

 

Klaus didn’t say anything. At least, he didn’t say any words— instead, he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, groaning slightly in response.

 

Diego clicked his tongue, shaking his head. “No— I don't care if you don’t want to go to a hospital. You’re practically dead.” _Thank god you’re not_.

 

Klaus didn’t “say” anything else, after that. Either because he’d fallen back into nothingness, or because he’d given in.

 

Eventually, a couple of cop cars and an ambulance screeched into the motel’s parking lot, and police tape began to weave its way across the scene, forming almost like spider webs, as concrete became a set for some kind of sick comedy of Diego’s life. They loaded Klaus up into the vehicle, telling him that “he’ll be alright.” They offered to let him sit in the ambulance, to watch the heart monitor; read the inconsistencies and static as his brother tip toed along the frays of limbo. He declined.

 

Then came the matter of the investigation.

 

“I’m sorry about your brother, Diego. Really, I am. I understand that your whole family situation wasn’t ideal, but I know you care about him,” Eudora began, after appropriately leading Diego behind the ice machine where the forensics teams weren’t poking around for drugs. “But that doesn’t excuse this little side mission of yours.”

 

“You weren’t going to find this place without me, Eudora,” Diego argued. His voice lacked the usual humor, but she continued the conversation as if it were the same as any other.

 

“You don’t get to call me that anymore,” she chastised, eyebrows furrowing and balancing on the edge of annoyed and worried. “You could’ve passed the information on, instead of jeopardizing a scene like this.”

 

“You weren’t going to find my brother without me,” Diego corrected. “You would’ve arrested him.”

 

She inhaled sharply. “About that.”

 

“No,” Diego snapped. “No, you are not detaining my little brother. He was obviously a victim in this scenario!”

 

“You two are the same age, Diego.” She adjusts her ponytail, which seems haphazard, as if she got the call mid-sleep. It was quite late. “Besides, it’s protocol to at least question him for this case. You know that.”

 

“Yeah I do know that, and it’s a stupid rule,” he grumbled.

 

She smiled a smile with a twang of sadness as she looked him over. “You’re also extremely biased. Most of the stuff he’s on is probably, no, definitely illegal.”

 

She had a point. She had a lot of points. It’s why he liked her in the first place. But that didn’t change the fact that Klaus was innocent. He knew it, without a sliver of a doubt. The guy may have been a duplicitous trickster with an affinity for pleasure, but he never intentionally harmed anyone. It’s one of the reasons why their dad hated him so much. One among many.

 

“I can’t let you arrest him, Eudora.”

 

“I never said I would.”

 

They stayed silent for a few moments, choking on the noise of investigation and sirens. Diego wondered what would’ve happened if he’d stayed with Klaus— if he’d have heard the flat line yet. Eudora cleared her throat.

 

“Well… We’ll have to protect him while we’re investigating the druglord.” She watched the highway as it built up geometric patterns of headlight trails. “I can arrange for you to take him, instead of keeping him at the station or hospital, if you’d like.”

 

“I’m not sure what I’d like.”

 

“Then what would _he_ like?”

 

He never thought about that. She probably didn’t even realize it, but her words reminded him of a less than notable moment at the Academy, when they were all kids and saw the world in genres of good and evil, reading their own comic books with wonder, because they were real superheroes, holy shit! They didn’t recognize the unique tortures that the house contained within its walls, and ignored the steadily disintegrating sense of family that had begun to creep up on them once they went public.

 

As a kid, Klaus was a strange mix of attention-seeking and bystander. He’d watch as Luther and Diego would battle it out, glee stroked across his features— only chaos could entertain a person like him— and then he’d annoy the hell out of his siblings, begging for someone, anyone, to indulge in his insanity. It was hard for anyone to take him completely seriously.

 

Klaus always preferred dressing up with the girls to the sporty scuffles his brothers would entertain themselves with, however, there was one point where it became far more than that. One day, Klaus came down the stairs in an unironic dress he’d begged Grace for. Their father had yelled at him, demanding he change into something reserved, less flamboyant, whatever, and for the first time, Klaus refused.

 

Obviously, this appalled Luther, but they all decided to have a talk with Number Four. His antics were annoying at best, and damaging at worst, since their father’s temper effected all of them.

 

Diego remembers Luther asking: _“Is there any other way you can beg for attention?”_

 

Klaus had replied with a confused frown. _“I just like to do it, though.”_

They dropped it afterwards, and it became apparent that Klaus’ spontaneity often regarded himself, rather than others. One day, he’d be stealing Allison’s skirts, the next, he’d be swathed in some absurd Hot Topic ensemble, and they’d just figured that if it wasn’t a phase, it was just Klaus, and it was fine. But it reminded Diego that his brother had some sort of motivation behind his behavior. That he wanted things.

 

So when Eudora asked him what Klaus wanted, he didn’t have an answer. Because he didn’t know.

 

-

-

-

            Hospital rooms weren’t welcoming, but Klaus was used to waking up to a white ceiling and an IV in his arm. Honestly, he couldn't remember jack from the previous night. How he ended up ODing this time. He got flashes of sticky sheets and delusional heat, but nothing particularly notable.

 

            “You’re awake.”

 

Ben’s voice was dry and purple, though it had blurred around the edges ever since he’d died. Klaus wasn’t sure if the change was a literal barrier between physicality and spirituality, or if Ben had just lost some of that spark on his own. Either way, he couldn’t really reply, voice caught in a dry throat, lungs on the brink of collapse. His chest feels heavy, and the white of the hospital is overwhelming. They don’t give painkillers to junkies, and he can feel himself crashing down into an unwelcome sobriety. Everything hurts.

 

“Diego found you, you know,” Ben added, not looking away from the book he was reading. Klaus wasn’t sure how Ben could read a book corporeally, but he was sure he’d asked the question before, and in better circumstances, so he let it be.  


            Klaus grunted in reply. A confused grunt; a reluctant grunt.

 

            “They have to question you and stuff. With him involved, it will probably be about more than the drug bust.” Ben closes his impossible book and looks at Klaus’ pathetic self clinically. “There’s water on the table.”

 

            _Right_. Klaus shakily reached for the plastic cup on his bedside table, right next to a vase of faux flowers that they put there for anyone whose loved ones didn’t care enough to get something, and chugged the water until he was sipping at air, gurgling it in his throat comically.

 

            “Now _that_ was refreshing,” he exclaimed, voice still hoarse. “I was parched.”

 

            “They had to pump your stomach, you know.”

 

            “What else is new?” Klaus sighed, moving to rip the needles from his arms and motioning towards the window. “You think I can make the jump?”

 

            “I know you _can’t_ make the jump. You’re on the third floor, Klaus.”

 

            “Can’t know for sure unless I try! You’re the optimist here, Ben.” Klaus grabbed his pillow. “Think I can tie one of those blanket ropes and climb from the window? Like one of those troubled orphans in a straight to DVD kids movie.”

 

            “You have one pillow case. You’re also handcuffed to the bed.”

 

            Klaus looked down at his other wrist in surprise. “So I am.”

 

            “So you are,” Ben deadpanned. “Better get comfortable.”

 

            “ _Sheisse_ ,” Klaus swore. He liked using German every once in a while, even though he knew about four and a half sentences worth of the language. When he was younger, there was a woman who always sang to him in German, with big green eyes and curly brown hair and blood all over her legs. She was dead, of course, but he didn’t know that until he started seeing the unkind ghosts as well.

 

            Eventually Diego comes in, flanked a detective lady and a doctor who both have seperate clipboards. One held his medical past, while the other held his criminal future.

 

            “Well hello _mon frère_!” Klaus greeted, with a friendly, but cold wave. “Here to send me to rehab? I’ve been meaning to collect another 30 day chip.”

 

            “Klaus—” Diego started, before the detective lady cut him off.

 

            “Sir, I need to ask you a series of questions surrounding your overdose and dealer, if that’s quite alright. The doctor here would also like to have a few words with you before your brother can send you anywhere.”

 

            Klaus shrugged. Diego glared.

 

            “Wonderful.” She sits down. “My name is Detective Patch, I work with the city’s police force on large scale investigations. We found you at a known hideaway of a very wanted gang leader and drug dealer. We have reasons to believe that he has also had a hand in multiple human trafficking cases as well… Though that is of no matter to you. We just need to know what you know.”

 

            Ben shook his head, Klaus clicked his tongue in annoyance. The Detective looked offended, even though it wasn’t aimed at her. He didn’t try to explain himself. “Yeah, yeah, I remember a guy like that!”

 

            “Really?” Her eyes filled with hope. Too bad he’d crush it moments later.

 

            “Everyone in this dump of a city, Detective.” He licked his lips, which had crusted over, chapped and raw. “I was just high as fuck and looking for a place to stay. Dealer sent me to the motel and there’s not much I can remember after that. It’s all very delicate, you see. I’m a fragile young man.”

 

            She sighed, looking to Diego for something. In response, he cleared his throat.  


            “Stop it with the funny business, Klaus. What happened?”

 

            “Oh, I’m telling the truth,” he exclaimed. It wasn’t a lie, but he still sounded sardonic, with the cadence of a drunk songbird. “Is that all you needed? Can I get my morphine now?”

 

            “You’re not getting any drugs,” the Doctor sighed, turning the clipboard in his direction as if to point something out. “Your body is practically filled to the brim with poison.”

 

            “Hell yeah it is,” Klaus chuckled, raising a hand for a high five (pun intended). The Doctor gives him a dirty look, glaring at the shitty tattoo on Klaus’ palm. “And I don’t want to starve myself. Being sober for more than twenty seconds really takes the life out of you.”

 

            “Focus, Klaus,” Diego grunted. Klaus shrugged in response, leaning his head into the crook of his free palm, sarcastically, as if to say ‘I’m all ears.’ 

 

            “Thank you Diego,” Patch whispered. There was definitely history there. Maybe he could play them off one another. A full-on Fistful of Dollars sort of game. “Klaus, we need to know if you know _anything_ about this case. A name… or even another hideout?”

 

            He thought for a moment. At first, it was a mock-thought, a simple act to get her off his case— but in the seconds of stillness, his mind took a midnight walk through the seemingly empty roads of memory, dark with stupors. He saw a flash, of something— a tile floor, a whole fuckton of blood, some girl with a terrible bleach job, and a man with an eerie smile on his face. Sitting in the middle of this fragile memory web was a Bible, one of those ones you find in the drawer of hotel rooms, it was covered in white powder, as if used as a surface to snort it. There were pages of the book ripped out, with phone numbers and names written in the margins.

 

            “I remember a phone number, actually,” Klaus mused. Patch perked up, pen dancing in her hand as she got ready to write down _anything_ useful. “Well, I’m not sure if it was a phone number. There were letters in it too. But I remember a number-adjacent thing.”

 

            “Can you recite it?”

 

            “Yeah, sure.”

 

            He recited what he could remember. He usually didn’t remember much, but the powder and the paper stuck out in his mind. Maybe it was the irony: a bible being used for the slimiest of tasks by the slimiest of people in the slimiest of motel rooms. He always found stuff like that funny. Maybe it was because he’d stared into nothingness for hours after getting high, and that’s where his eyes trained on. Maybe it was just luck. He knew that he had to be at least partially right, because Patch smiled slightly, in that way that people smile when wild geese are easier to catch.

 

            “A plate number,” she exclaimed, with quiet joy. “Is there anything else you can remember?”

 

            “Not that I recall,” Klaus replied, before smiling. “I’m sure some morphine would jog my memory though.”

 

            Ben laughed darkly. “You’re the _worst_.”

 

            “I’m serious!” Klaus insisted. “Go ask a psychologist or whatever— people remember shit better when they’re in the same state as they were when doing said shit!”

 

            “Maybe,” Patch chuckled. “But I’m afraid that _that_ is a last resort option. I’m sure you need your rest.”

 

            “Are you leaving now? I’ve seen this episode of SVU. If you’re not careful, you’re gonna find me dead in the morning. Some bad guy disguised as a nurse will come in and put some real strong shit in my IV bag and wham-o it’s that scene in Kill Bill. Except I’ll be dead. _Wunderbar!”_

            “I’ll be back to ask you more questions. It’s up to you, but Diego has offered to keep you in his… custody until the investigation is over. You are welcome to remain here or in a rehab facility, however. That is up to the both of you.” She wrote a few things down on her clipboard, as if coming up with new leads mid conversation.

 

            Eventually she left the room. The doctor had a few stern words to share, and Klaus gladly ignored them in favor of watching a little dead girl pace around the room singing creepy lullabies and looking for her parents. He really wanted some morphine.

 

            When the Doctor left, it was just Klaus and Diego (and Ben, but no one needed to know that, did they?) It was awkward, to say the least. Things had changed since Allison’s wedding, both of them were even shittier than before, and both of them had grown even further away from the family.

 

            “Ok, Klaus,” Diego started. “What’s it gonna be?”

 

            “You’re actually giving me a choice on this?” Klaus wondered, completely and unashamedly flabbergasted. “I thought you had already signed the Number-Four-Adoption-Papers and that this was just a cursory gesture. Or you’d already signed my soul to the rehab-reaper and I was already en route to another milestone! I wasn’t lying about my collection.”

 

            “I thought it’d be better to let you decide,” Diego sighed. He’d almost forgotten why he’d forgotten about Klaus for all that time. It was because he needed to block those years of chatter and hyperbole if he ever wanted to sleep at night.

 

            “Well that is a nice first, Numero two.” Klaus attempted fingerguns, but his wrist was still shackled, so it ended up yanking him downwards. Ouch. “What would you prefer? I’m here for your convenience, after all.”

 

            He wasn’t sure if it was passive aggressive, or just passive, but Diego ignored the tone of Klaus’ voice.

 

            “I’d prefer whatever you think will help you the most.”

 

            “With what? Drugs? That’s not going away any time soon. The investigation? I’m sure I won’t remember anything anytime soon.”

 

            “In general.”

 

            Klaus quickly grew bored of their conversational ping-pong, and cut straight to the chase. “Whichever gets me out of the hospital first.”

 

            “Why, you itching for drugs that bad?”

 

            “There are six corpses in this room muttering about how horrible their deaths were and it’s really not a fun place to be, broseph.”

 

            Right.

 

            “Are hospitals always like that?” Diego wondered.

 

            “Only when I’m not on morphine.”

 

            Diego sighed. “I’ll get the car.”

 

            “Absolutely _fabulous_.”

 

-

-

-

            _Their dad used to let them be kids. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing, since most of said things were under strict scientific observation, and with some unsavory motivation behind it. The Hargreeves siblings didn’t care, obviously. They were too young to understand that their little pocket of the world wasn’t normal. Meanwhile, Klaus had figured out how_ he _wasn’t normal when Mom put a crayon in his hand and a big piece of paper in front of him. Vanya was drawing all sorts of cool musical notes, and Diego had started on a huge red dragon. Arts and crafts were always his favorite._

_“Who is that?” Mom asked._

_He nearly burst into tears at the question._

_“Why are you crying?” She put her hands on his shoulders._

_He couldn’t put his feelings into words, since he was too young to understand language’s nuances, but he tried._

_Mom sighed. “It isn’t a bad drawing at all, sweetheart! It’s very detailed,” she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I think you’re the best artist of all.”_

_“Then why don’t you know who it is?”_

_All of his siblings are looking at him now, confused, but entertained by his frustration._

_“I’ve never seen him before, dear.”_

_“But he’s always right here with us!”_

_It turned out that he’d drawn a ghost. One with kind eyes and a droopy face, that always sat by the fireplace and told Klaus all about his life. His Dad thought he was lying at first, but Mom pulled out all of his drawings, and they all had these people that none of them had seen before. Some were bloody and others were painted with big friendly smiles. It was apparent that this wasn’t just a ploy for attention._

_As Klaus grew up, the ghosts became less friendly. Or he became less nice to them, now that he knew they were dead. There were times at the breakfast table where he would just slam his hands over his ears and scream for them to go away. Maybe there were rumors in the dead community that there was a kid who could see them. Maybe that he could help them. But eventually it was a detriment._

_He wanted a power like Allison’s. She could get whatever she wanted, and if she didn’t want to use it, she didn’t have to. Klaus’ mind was on the fritz twenty four seven, and even when he actively decided to use his powers, there was barely anything he could actually do with them to help the team. He learned how to fight, but then he stopped caring, and that was it._

_-_

_-_

_-_

            “Where have you been living, Klaus?” Diego asked, pulling the car into reverse. “We can pick up your things if you want.”

 

            Klaus lets out a bark of laughter.

 

            “What’s so funny?”

 

            “What things?” He watches the road pick up speed around them as they got onto the highway. “Why do you think I was sleeping at that motel?”

 

            “You can’t even hold a job?”

 

            “I’ve held a job. Or two. They’re more… contract work than anything.”

 

            Diego sighed. He didn’t really want to know what that meant, since it could mean a lot of things. He asked anyways. “Like what?”

 

            “What I do best. Living that Haley Joel Osment life, sucking dick, buying drugs.” He winks at thin air. “If I’m desperate I’ll contact people’s dead husbands and tell them that they always loved their families or something, and if I’m feeling spicy I’ll let dealers have a piece of this ass for a discount.”

 

            “You _sell_ your power?”

 

            “And my body, thanks for asking.” Klaus shrugged. “I mean it’s not like it’s a useful ability. I can’t throw things real good or teleport or even summon an eldritch horror from my stomach— yeah I _know_ that sucks too— but at least you can do your stuff baggage-free.”

 

            Diego didn’t want to mention that none of them were “baggage free,” so he refrained.

 

            “Anyways, I’ll be out of your hair in the next few days, mi hermano,” Klaus sighed. “And you can go back to your fun Batman routine.”

 

            Diego put his foot down, glaring at Klaus through the mirror. “No. You’re not running away until this drug bust is done with.”

 

            “You can’t make me.”

 

            “I’m sure that I can figure something out.”

 

            Klaus groans with that overdramatic adolescence that Diego hadn’t seen in years. When Klaus was high, he didn’t get upset, not in the way that he did off the drugs. He’d lash out when sober, consistently irritated with the two worlds he was stuck listening to, and never understood. Diego couldn’t say he missed it, but he was at least a little relieved that his brother hadn’t lost his _entire_ personality to street gutters and nameless dealers.

 

            Diego wondered how much had actually changed.

 

            The closest he ever got to Klaus was before Ben died. They were sixteen and sick of everything. Vanya had gotten extremely invested in violin, probably because she had nothing else to do, and the idea of a hobby intrigued both Diego and Klaus. They’d sit in her room and ask her about all sorts of things, musical things, and she’d teach them the basics. The three of them had formed a makeshift band. Vanya on violin, Diego on guitar, and Klaus on vocals. Klaus had loved writing lyrics, and now they were engraved into his bedroom wall.

 

            Other than their little trio, which quickly came to an end when Ben died and Klaus fell off the face of the earth, and Vanya went off to write her little tell-all book, was all Diego ever saw of his brother. His childhood was primarily focused on his unimportant arms race with Luther, or his vacillation between disdain for their father, and loyalty to the Academy’s purpose.

 

            Klaus was mumbling under his breath, staring out the window and blinking every time they passed a telephone pole. Diego could never tell if Klaus was talking to ghosts or himself when he got like that. When they were younger, it wasn’t clear either.

 

            Diego cleared his throat.

 

            Klaus met his eyes lazily. “Yes?”

 

            “We’re getting off at the next exit,” he started. “You hungry or anything?”

 

            “I could go for waffles,” Klaus suggested. He was the most random of people, wasn’t he?

 

            “Why waffles?”

 

            Klaus shrugged. “I haven’t had them in a few years, and it struck me just now that _that_ is very sad.”

 

            “I mean, _I_ haven’t eaten waffles since living at the Academy, and I’m living my best life out here.”

 

            “The Diego doth protest too much methinks!” Klaus joked. “Nah, without waffles, man is merely a means to an end. Ashes to ashes, syrup to syrup. We are nothing sans Eggos and Belgium.”

 

            “Did you steal morphine while we left the hospital because I swear you’re high right now.”

 

            “High? It’s pronounced ‘visionary,’ my brotato chip.”

 

            “Sure.”

 

-

-

-

            “So you literally live in a boxing ring?” Klaus asked, spinning as he looked over the room. The fighters and Al gave him strange looks that he obviously ignored, and Diego just returned their stares with a gesture to let it be.

 

            “Yes,” Diego replied.

 

            “You’re so cool, man.” Whether the statement was sarcastic or not wasn’t apparent. Either Klaus was mocking him, or felt genuine compassion towards his brother. He couldn’t tell.

 

            He unlocked the door, letting Klaus in first while he scanned the halls for any possible intruders or watchers. It clicked behind him.

 

            “This feels like the ‘before’ part of a febreeze commercial,” Klaus joked. “I think I’m already collecting dust.”

 

            “I like to keep it clean,” Diego deadpanned.

 

            Klaus nodded repeatedly, as if concentrating on a thought, before letting it go. “I’ll just put my shit over here.”

 

            “You don’t have anything to put anywhere.”

 

            Klaus dropped a few quarters onto Diego’s coffee table, they spun like tops before falling to rest, leaving marks in the dust. “I have my savings.”

 

            “Do you even have a change of clothes or anything?” Diego wondered, pouring himself a glass of water, which had a rusty hue to it. He’d have to check with Al about that one.

 

            “Sometimes, yeah.” Klaus hung himself over the couch like one of Jack’s French girls, watching the ceiling fan cast shadows over the walls, following each dance of darkness as if it were a firefly. “But then there will be nights where I go to sleep, and wake up with nothing but a headache, and that’s okay.”

 

            Klaus still looked like he was a breath away from death, but the way he lit up a room with his air, his eyes, was absolutely impossible. It hurt, really, to see someone so utterly committed to destroying themselves, but who still managed to shine brightly.

 

            “So what do you do with your life?” Klaus asked. “You know what I do— I mean you fuckin’ saw it last night or whatever. But are you anything but a pining vigilante?”

 

            “I don't _pine_.”

 

            “Sure. Tell that to the lady cop. I’d say nice catch if you weren’t so hopeless.”

 

            He decided to change the topic. Klaus had no concept of emotional mediums— it was either pure passion and obsession, or complete indifference to him— so he couldn’t understand the conflicting tides that had consumed Diego’s love life. He pointed to the posters on the wall. “I box sometimes, if you couldn’t tell.”

 

            “Fun.” Klaus turned to the embroidery hung on the wall. The one that Mom had sewn when she first gave them their names. “Sentimental sort?”

 

            “I couldn’t throw it away,” he replied.

 

            “Ha! I could.” Klaus didn’t continue until Diego gave him an incredulous look. “Pawned it. Didn’t have anywhere to put it or anything, and it was unique, vintage Umbrella Academy merch. You’d be surprised what people will pay for that stuff.”

 

            “You could’ve just left it at the Academy,” Diego argued. “You don’t have to throw out the good stuff.”

 

            “There was good stuff? Oh do go on, Brosicle.” He cracked a humorless smile, before glaring at the air. “Shut the fuck up.”

 

            “Excuse me?”

 

            “That wasn’t meant for you, D, you’re good.”

 

            He almost forgot about the whole talking to dead people thing. To be fair, all of the Hargreeves had forgotten about it at one point, since not only was the ability invisible, Klaus was barely even able to do it half the time. He wondered if he ever tried talking to Ben.

 

            “What finally did it for you, man?” Klaus eventually asked, after a long stare down with a broken lamp.

 

            “Did what?”

 

            “Why’d you leave the Academy?” He shrugged, pulling out an empty lollipop stick and balancing it between his teeth out of bored habit. “I never asked. Or cared. But this is a whole bonding moment, yeah?”

 

            “Yeah.”

 

            “So what did it? You were always into the whole one-upping Luther game, which was honestly the only entertainment that we had in that fucking place, so I am sad to see it go.”

 

            “People leave when they grow up,” Diego explained. “Wanted to do something for myself, for once. I could save lives on my own, without the Academy on my ass.”

 

            “Makes sense, for someone like you, I guess.” Klaus frowned. “Dunno if we ever grew up, though. Do you have any weed?”

 

            If anyone had asked Diego how to get used to whiplash, he’d tell them to have a five minute conversation with Klaus. The rollercoaster of tone and absurdity and flavor left little to be desired. And yet it was endearing.

 

            “No, I do not.”

 

            “That’s fuckin’ shit man. Why’d you quit the police game if you’re not even gonna have fun with it?”

 

            “I do have fun with it.” Diego cracked his neck, and then each of his knuckles, in routine formation. He always counted the scars on his fingers. “No paperwork, tons of knives.”

 

            “That is a low bar.”

 

            “Says you.”

 

            Klaus didn’t have anything to say for that. And they didn’t talk any more, falling into a hazy, dusty sleep. Maybe Diego had been harsh. Maybe Klaus was just _like that_ — but in the morning, the couch was empty.

 

            He never asked why Klaus left.

-

-

-

 

 

            There must have been a point in time, in that fucked up period that he called a childhood, where Klaus liked it. Liked being forgotten, left behind. He wasn’t like Vanya, he was still included in the ever-sadder family portraits that lined the gilded walls— but there was a moment where Reginald Hargreeves must’ve looked at him, at his bloodshot eyes or painted nails or wandering mind, and wondered why he even bothered with his Number 4— and when that moment came, Klaus reveled in it. It was exhilarating, when no one _cared_ where he was or what he felt, because before, when it mattered, it hurt.

 

            But now, he was awfully lonely.

 

            “You’re going to freeze to death, Klaus,” Ben sighed, crossing his arms. He shivered by proxy, even though the chill didn’t touch him.

 

            “Shut up, Ben.”

 

            “You literally could’ve stayed at Diego’s place for weeks without any repercussions. No payments or… _payments_.”

 

            “Yeah, so? He doesn’t get me.” Klaus stuffed his hands into his pockets, one of them had a small tear in the bottom, and he played around with the fray until the thing became, virtually, another sleeve.

 

            “I’m with you 24/7 and I don’t even get you. Like it or not, you’re kind of a wild card.”

 

            “You don’t get me, but you _try_ to get me.” He didn’t mention how Ben was sort of forced to try, since his only connection to life was his brother.

 

            “You’re gonna make a dumb decision, Klaus.”

 

            “I am a dumb decision in the making, Ben.” He licked his thumb, before rifling through a stack of bills. “Diego is fucking stacked, somehow.”

 

            “Seriously? Stealing from your brother? He saved your life like a day ago!”

 

            “Big mistake.”

 

            “Why do I have to live with this?”

 

            “You don’t have to live with anything.”

 

            He was right. Klaus knew he was right— because Ben chose to stick by him, like a moron. Otherwise, he’d go away when Klaus got high. He didn’t know whether to hate his brother’s insistence, or rely on it. He usually floated between the two, and one of these days he knew that Ben would just disappear, and his lifeline would be gone. That was fine, he told himself, because then he’d have an excuse to completely stop caring.

 

            Klaus ended up buying enough pills to last a week, and downed them in an hour, before curling up underneath a dumpster. It felt, strangely, more like home than Diego’s couch. He didn’t know whether that was sad or not.

 

-

-

-

 

“You can’t keep one junkie under your watch for _one_ night?”

 

“Apparently not, no.”

 

Eudora Patch sighed, in that way that people sigh when every road led to the shittiest of Romes. Diego had called her that morning, explaining how he’d woken up to an empty boiler room, and she, for the first time ever, actually invited him into the station. Now they sat outside the station, matching coffee cups gripped in their hands.

 

“You’d think that your _brother_ would enjoy staying with you. Otherwise I would’ve kept him in the hospital.”

 

“My family is fucked, Eudora.” Diego brought his hands behind his head. “Everyone knows it.”

 

“Well I never actually read that book of your sister’s,” she admitted. “It seemed… intrusive.”

 

“Yeah, no shit it was.” He ran a hand over his chin. “She didn’t just complain about how we treated her, which would’ve been one thing. She revealed everything to the world. Everything she knew at least.”

 

“What didn’t she know?”

 

“Hell if I know.” He looked at her incredulously. “You really didn't read the book?”

 

“No. I didn’t even really follow that whole Umbrella Academy thing when it was famous. I did a bit of research when we were… you know.”

 

“I definitely know.”

 

“Shut up.”

 

The air hangs awkwardly around them. It was strange, because their chemistry never faded when they broke it off (or rather, when _she_ broke it off). They still flirted, they still knew each other’s angles and colours, they just didn’t know how to deal with it.

 

“My brother Klaus has always been a nutjob,” Diego said, suddenly. “I’m sure he had his reasons. His… ability is a nightmare, our Dad hated him— and more than the rest.”

 

“Though… All of you Hargreeves kids are crazy in your own right.”

 

“I guess we are.”

 

“Estranged or not,” Eudora started, standing up and wiping her pants down. “Your brother is probably in danger, especially since he gave the police information so freely. Those sorts of dealers don’t take that kind of thing lightly. Snitches—”

 

“Get stitches. Yeah.”

 

-

-

-

 

_Klaus screamed, which was normal. Sometimes a ghost would startle him, or sometimes he’d stub his toe particularly hard, or he’d have a particularly unnerving night terror— customary Klaus behavior. What wasn’t normal was the sheer bonechilling sadness that it contained. Diego was home sick for this mission, and Klaus had stopped going on the more dangerous missions with his less than combat-savvy ability (and his perpetual drugged out state). Vanya was always home. So Diego heard the scream. He heard the screams that followed._

_“No, no,_ No! _Fuck!”_

_He heard a few bangs. Diego knew from the sound of it that Klaus had tried and failed to punch a hole through the wall. He decided that maybe it was a good plan to see what had happened. Vanya seemed to have the same idea, because she approached Klaus’ bedroom door with that same hesitant curiosity. The door was slightly ajar, and they could see feather down swarming around the room as Klaus ripped into pillows with an undefined emotional fervor._

_He looked at them, and his eyes were overflowing with tears._

_“What happened?” Vanya asked._

_“I saw Ben,” he replied, simply, with a quiver in his voice. “I see Ben.”_

_“W-what do you mean?” Diego stuttered, though he knew. He knew before he realized. There was a weight in his stomach of deep loss._

_“Ben’s dead, D.”_

_And he was right. The rest of the Umbrella Academy returned home with bloody clothes and unhinged eyes. They didn’t have his body. Klaus did. All he could see was Ben’s body, and he locked himself up in his room until it was time to take the updated family photo. It was only then that Diego understood what Klaus’ power really meant. Why he hated it. At the same time, though, Diego felt his own little green horned monster pop out from time to time, ‘cause at least Klaus could see their brother._

_At least, if he wasn’t high off his ass, every waking moment._

_-_

_-_

_-_

 

It was easier finding Klaus than Diego thought. The guy had a propensity to disappear into the gutter, only existing in rehab stints and candy wrappers on the street. However, Eudora put out an APB, and got an answer within the hour.

 

“He’s passed out in a dumpster on forty-seven,” she said. “If I hadn’t seen your couch, I’d wonder why he prefers it.”

 

“You like my couch.”

 

They pulled up to the location, where another cop already sat posted at, guiding them to the correct alleyway and dumpster. Klaus was curled up, halfway underneath the fixture, practically dwarfed by his tattered coat.

 

Diego nudged him in the chest with his foot, and again, sharper, when there was no response. Klaus jolted up like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, taking ahold of Diego’s ankle and attempting to throw him as far away as his toothpick arms could muster. If Diego hadn’t taught him that exact technique, he would’ve been caught off guard. Klaus’ green eyes were wide at first, but narrowed as they recognized his “assailants.”

 

“You interrupted my beauty sleep, man.” The retort was half assed, backed by none of the usual flare. “I was enjoying my Raccoon lifestyle. It’s trending, nowadays, you know.”

 

“Why did you leave last night?” Eudora questioned, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, arms crossed sternly.

 

“What’re you, my mom?” He giggled, obviously still high on _something._ “Noooo… My mom is a robot, _ha.”_

“Get up,” she sighed.

 

“You can’t _make me_.”

 

Diego raised an eyebrow, and motioned to his ensemble of knives.

 

“You wouldn’t stab me though, right? You wouldn’t. That’s arrestable.”

 

“You mean illegal.”

 

“Five more minutes, please.” Klaus shut his eyes like someone was shining a flashlight in his face.

 

They ended up practically dragging him into the car. He didn’t put up much of a fight. He didn’t seem to care.

 

“Why’d you leave last night?” Eudora asked again. “Would you prefer the hospital to your brother’s home?”  


“No. No hospitals. Too loud.” Klaus’ eyes remained closed. It was a gentler position, now that he leaned against a window instead of a literal trashbag. “Didn’t wanna bother anyone. Diego has people to kill. I think that’s arrestable.”

 

“I’ll ignore that statement.”

 

“Thank you,” Diego pitched in, though he was quietly focused on the road. Focused on listening, for this go. He wanted to know, too, why Klaus had left. He didn’t really care about the drug bust, not right now anyways. Why did his brother leave the offered comfort of Diego’s home?

 

“Anyways, I wanted to go have a decent conversation and I needed some weed and then best came to best and I hit the raunchiest of hays, no intrusion on your brood-cave.” Klaus talked with a purposeful slur, as if trying to convince himself that he was as out of his mind as he acted.

 

Eudora turned to Diego and sighed. “I don’t know what to do here. I want to trust that you can keep him out of trouble, I don’t want to lock your brother up, Diego.”

 

Diego glared at Klaus. “What’s it gonna be, Number Four?”

 

“I’m always down for waffles.”

 

-

-

-

The water ran over his face, cold but familiar, dripping onto the collar of his shirt and through to his chest. Klaus stared into the mirror, which he hadn’t done in a while, to see a skeleton. Pale and uninspired, it was ironic really, how he looked more like a corpse than his posse of ever annoying spirits. _Ah, Klaus, I knew him well, Horatio._

He turned off the sink, and rubbed excess water from his eyes, before once again entering Diego’s boiler room. He wondered if the place had picked any meaning up over the years like it had picked up scars: knife marks and sweat stains that decorated the walls. Diego sharpened one of his knives on a custom whetstone that he’d affixed to the wall, though his eyes didn’t leave Klaus. He guessed that any escape was moot this go around.

 

“I’m not going to sleep until I’m sure you’re out cold, I hope you know,” Diego growled. “You’re lucky she didn’t put you in jail or something.”

 

Klaus chuckled. “Been there done that. Not bad if you’re high the whole time.”

 

“There can’t be that many ghosts in jail. It’s not like the hospital or something, right?” Diego wondered. He didn’t really understand how Klaus’ powers worked.

 

“Dead people don’t just chill where they died. Some do, I guess. Some move on to the afterlife, unless conjured by yours truly. Some follow family. Other’s follow their killers.” Klaus popped a cigarette into his mouth, flashing the box to face Diego to prove that they were just plain ol’ lung killing cancer sticks. He never ended up lighting the end, but took long breaths as if he were inhaling the smoke, on principle, maybe. “Murderers have a whole marching band of decaying victims.”

 

The words were strange, but not out of character. If Klaus wasn’t high and silly and unshackled, he was cynical and morbid. Fascinated with the absurd, unimpressed with the grounded. He wasn’t sure if it came from his power, or if he just arrived to the world covered in dreadfully ironic tattoos.

 

Diego cocked an eyebrow. “You could be a cop.”

 

“I would believe that you forgot how to speak human language before believing that you said those words out loud, to me, right now, after the past two and a half days of my inability to stay out of the way of, let alone _spearhead_ some cop thing.”

 

“You could catch killers easily. Ask their victims.”

 

“That was the whole point, wasn’t it?” Klaus laughed humorlessly. “I’m the psychic, yeah? I’m there to point your knives in the right direction.”

 

“Why didn’t you?”

 

“You underestimate the bullshit that is this ability, Diego. You can hold your breath and throw knives— I doubt that it’s been a burden on your psyche.”

 

“You don’t know a thing about me, Klaus,” Diego warned. His face had contorted in a strange way, as if he were holding his tongue in a way to keep himself from stuttering, or lashing out. Or both. “Don’t pretend to.”

 

“I’m genuinely curious about what my brother’s been up to, I guess.”

 

“You don’t want to know a thing about me.” Diego crossed his legs. “Trust me.”

 

“You sound like a vampire love interest from a young adult novel, honestly. You’d think that you could see the dead, at this point!” Klaus paused, looking in the other direction and pursing his lips. “Yeah, I wonder how that’d go.”

 

“I’d use it, for one.”

 

“You wouldn’t.” He took another faux drag of his unlit cigarette. He cut Diego off as he opened his mouth. “You don’t _use_ this, D. You can’t just decide ‘hey lets fuckin’ talk to Freddie Mercury’ or something. It’s always on. Like how Luther is always strong. I can always _see_ and _hear_.”

 

“Well, I wouldn’t put that shit in my body.” Diego lifted himself onto his feet, and grabbed the cigarette from Klaus’ mouth, snapping it in half under his thumb. “Dad fucked all of us up, you don’t see Allison, or Luther, or Vanya, or _me_ drowning it all out with death wishes.”

 

“I mean, you go after criminals with knives.”

 

“Because I’m a badass, obviously.”

 

“That’s its own kind of death wish, isn’t it?” Klaus exhaled like he still had a cigarette in his mouth. Diego wondered if he could see the ghost of that too. “Allison, she signed her soul to stardom— not that I’m not jealous. Vanya wrote that fuckin’ book and hasn’t smiled in a decade. Luther never left, and then he went to the moon or something. We all have death wishes.”

 

Klaus chuckled, before reaching into his pocket for a stray pill. “Mine is just a lot more fun,” he said, before popping it in his mouth, biting down with a satisfying crunch before Diego could react.

 

Diego didn’t have anything to say in reply. Klaus was right, in his own unhinged way. None of them were particularly sane— none of them were necessarily okay. They all had different ways of showing it, he guessed— Klaus was ironically the most honest about it. The downward spiral.

 

“You ever get high, Diego?” Klaus wondered aloud.

 

“Once or twice,” he admitted.

 

“You know that feeling, when you’re high, on something— it doesn’t have to be drugs— and everything gets blurry a bit?” Klaus’ voice trailed off every once in a while, as if he’d lost steam with every word, even as he continued. “Things get a little more blue, a little more warm, a little more… sweeter on the tongue.”

 

“I guess?” He didn’t really get it. The few times Diego had tried a joint, usually under Klaus’ recommendation, he’d just felt like a bubble. Light and loose, but still grounded in reality.

 

“I miss that.” Klaus’ eyes had dilated at this point, no longer staring at the ceiling fan, or the shadows it cast.

 

“You’re high right now, Klaus.”

 

“High is low for me, nowadays.”

 

“What’s _low_ for you, then?”

 

Klaus didn’t answer at first. Maybe he was figuring out the answer, or even the question. Maybe he didn’t even hear it at first. The air conditioning unit buzzed, echoing off of the drywall, vibrating under their feet. Eventually he spoke up, when the imaginary smoke had fully wormed its way through his lungs.

 

“Low is… it’s dark. Voices.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, as if to pick up any excess dust from that pill he’d crunched earlier. “I think I was eight?”

 

“Eight and dark— that’s your low?” He wanted to press further. He can’t find it in himself to try.

 

“Yeah. You?”

 

Diego cocked an eyebrow.

 

“What’s your low?”

 

He sighed. “Sometimes my words get stuck in my chest. I want to cut them out.”

 

“Ah. You don’t stutter like you used to, though.”

 

“It’s not always the stutter. Sometimes it’s just me.”

 

Klaus hummed.

 

They sat in silence for a bit. He didn’t know how long it was before Klaus was asleep, and he didn’t know how long it was before he followed suit, but Diego’s brother was still there when he woke up, drooling all over his only clean pillow and mumbling about something under his breath. He didn’t know why, but he felt more than relieved.

 

He might’ve actually smiled.

 


	2. fingers like raisins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m the spooky one with a death wish, yeah,” Klaus chuckled. “Want an autograph?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY Look iT's part 2!!! I seriously have no idea how to be consistent so like have a huge mashup of angsty fun ness. I guess there's an original character that has to do with the case.. but like it's not an OC past being a plot device so i didn't put it in the tags oh well. Anyways. I hope its good??? I'm not really sure, since i wrote most of this during the wee hours of the night after finishing my homework for the day (senior year is hell on my creativity chy'all). ANYWAYS LEMME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS IF YOU ENJOYED AND WHAT YOU ENJOYED!!!

It was nice, waking up to see that his brother hadn’t left. Truly. However, after a few more hours with Klaus’s drugged out chatter brought second thoughts up to the surface. Eudora had called him was he was chugging down some orange juice, explaining that she needed Klaus to identify some suspects at noon. So, until then, it was full on babysitting duty for Diego. If he didn’t want Klaus to go out and get himself stabbed for fun, he needed to keep him entertained. With someone like Klaus, who laughed at anything that moved, he thought it’d at least be somewhat easy. It wasn’t.

 

“You ever wonder where the Muppets puppets go when they’re not filming the movies?” Klaus’s voice was both clear and blurry. Words, over pronounced; timbre, ambivalent. “Like, do they lock those little dudes up in a closet? They’re _people,_ man!”

 

“They’re puppets,” Diego grumbled from behind the wheel. He was glad that he could put all of his attention on the road, now that they were en route to the police station. In ten minutes, Klaus would have other people to project his “charisma” onto.

 

“Yeah but like, they’re _people_.”

 

Diego shook his head, knuckles bleach white around the wheel. Just a few. More. Minutes.

 

“Hey do you think that Kermit the Frog has a dick?”

 

“Klaus, _literally_ What The Fuck?!” Diego almost crashed the car with his words.

 

“Like how do you distinguish…” Klaus made a hand motion from the back seat. Thank Christ that Diego didn’t have the privilege of seeing it first-hand.

 

“This conversation ended about ten minutes before it started.”

 

“I don’t think that’s how time works,” Klaus cackled. He must’ve popped some more pills within the last hour, since he was absolutely delighted by everything for the stupidest of reasons. Diego hoped that Eudora wouldn’t be on his ass about it.

 

She definitely ended up on his ass about it.

 

“You let your brother do drugs when I specifically asked you to keep him out of trouble? Really, Diego?”

 

He sighed. “You don’t _know him_. He hasn’t been sober since we were fourteen.”

 

“Well he can start now!”

 

Klaus sat between their argument, looking at the air like it was made of cotton candy.

 

“I know you have no respect for the law’s process, but at least have respect for the law itself, Diego.” She rested the bridge of her nose between her fingers as she regretted everything. Diego assumed she regretted everything. “You’re so lucky that you can get away with anything.”

 

“You’re lucky to let me.”

 

“Shut up.”

 

Klaus spoke up out of nowhere, as he often did. “Every time I blink I taste skittles.”

 

“Yeah, we get it, you’re high,” Eudora grumbled. She gently pushed Klaus towards the next room, as he looked around at nothing. He’d probably never been on this side of the police process, Diego realized, because usually Klaus was the one in the suspects lineup. Usually Klaus was the one cuffed to a chair.

 

There was another woman, twiddling her thumbs in the more private office. She had this disgusting bleach-job, patchy and stringy, with a face full of week-old makeup that cracked as she muttered to herself. She smelled like pot, and though she wore a police windbreaker, he could tell that whatever she wore underneath wasn’t modest. Probably had blotchy, faded tattoos, and pockmarks on her skin. She and Klaus were in the same boat, but this woman was drowning. Lost.

 

She looked up as they entered, opening her mouth to acknowledge them, but didn’t say anything. She had a chipped tooth, one of the front ones. Upon closer inspection, looking past the red, runny lipstick, her lip was busted up. Like someone had slapped her across the face with careless rage.

 

“We found her in the car we tracked down, the one with that plate number,” Eudora explained, walking towards the other side of the table. “Apparently, the thing was stolen. A lot of their vehicles are.”

 

“And then they left it,” Diego said.

 

“Seems like she was another junkie at that motel, but the guy took her for a little ride before skipping out.” Eudora pat the woman on the shoulder, and the woman didn’t react. She walked away, closer to Diego, with a lower voice, so that neither the woman nor Klaus could hear it. “We have reason to believe that both Skye here and your brother were targets for some sort of… human trafficking endeavor. We’re lucky that it didn’t go any further than that— _they’re_ lucky.”

 

Diego sighed. He wondered why his brother was so fucked up. He always thought that Klaus was the same as the rest of them, just bad at coping with it. But there was no way someone could spiral like this on impulse. Was it on purpose?

 

Klaus was leaning against the desk, looking at the woman with puzzled eyes. The way that people look at someone who they don’t know, but who they’ve seen before.

 

“Anyways.” He turned back to Eudora as she continued. “The car was our biggest lead, but that was a bust, since there’s no indication of where her… accompaniment went off to.”

 

The woman was shaking now, involuntarily. As if she was cold and hot at the same time. She was probably starved for drugs.

 

“I can’t help but wonder what they’ve seen… that they’ve forgotten,” Eudora whispered.

 

They lined up a bunch of random dealers and suspects, people that could’ve been in league with this mystery dealer. Klaus and the woman, Skye, were placed in front of the one-sided mirror to point out whoever they could recognize. Klaus said that the third one kind of looked like Bruce Willis, but other than that, nothing.

 

Diego and Eudora left the two under some underpaid intern’s watch, before peeling over files in the other room.

 

“So what do we know about the perp?” Diego asked.

 

“You’re not police.”

 

“Yeah, but what do we know?”

 

She was done with the game too, apparently, because she gave in pretty quickly.

 

“Right. So. We’ve found multiple operations, as you know, where junkies have flocked only to poison themselves with toxic drugs. Many of these busts have been linked through dealers and rings, we’ve seen trends of violence and gang activity match up… You know all this.”

 

“Yeah, but it helps to hear again.”

 

“Right.” She pulled out a file. “This person targets lost causes, none of the junkies have families, or anything like that.”

 

“Klaus does.”

 

“Does he?” She inhaled sharply. “Sorry, that was out of line.”

 

“No, you have a point.”

 

“Anyways, we have a sketch artist, coming. Skye, the woman back there, she claims to remember the guy’s face. Apparently, she got pretty intimate with him, before he left her to rot inside that Hundai.”

 

“You think that…?”

 

“You can ask your brother, though I doubt he remembers.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

They returned to the room where Klaus and Skye sat. Klaus didn’t seem to pay mind to the other people in the room, humming an unfamiliar tune, off-key and under his breath.

 

“Okay, K,” Diego said, clapping Klaus on the shoulder. “Let’s go get you sober.”

 

“How sober?”

 

“Just enough so that you stop looking at things that aren’t there,” Diego answered.

 

“I always see things that aren’t there,” Klaus whispered. “These ones are just nicer.”

 

Eudora raised her eyebrows, but didn’t comment. Instead, she led Skye to the door. “I’m going to take her to a private interrogation room, while we wait for the sketch artist. I’ll meet you outside. We can get lunch.”

 

“Is this a date?” Klaus asked.

 

“No,” Eudora deadpanned. “Diego would make an awful third wheel.”

 

“She’s funny, brotien shake.”

 

“Shut up, Klaus.”

“Right-o.”

 

-

-

-

 

_Diego was drenched. His hair might’ve been short, but water still ran down his face, a few minutes after pulling himself from the water. His lungs didn’t hurt as much as they would’ve if he were someone else. He couldn’t drown._

_Nonetheless, he still couldn’t see, when his father ordered him underwater. The tank that the man built was dark, soundless, and cold. He didn’t need to breathe, like other people did, but he still felt like a monster, holding his breath for hours. His dad wanted to test the longevity of his stupidly insignificant power, and when he realized that it was impossibly long, it got worse and worse._

_Mom would dry him off, lead him back to his room. She’d wring the water from his hair and hold his hand._

_“Your fingers are like raisins, see?” she said, pointing to his hands. They were shriveled, taking up their own sort of waves. She said it every time, but he’d still giggle a bit. Lighter, as she tucked him into bed._

_When he closed his eyes, he’d feel his gravity rock back and forth, as if all he had inside of himself were bubbles. He would exhale, when he was underwater, until there was no air left. It felt strange to feel empty, but not hungry for air. He was like his fingers. Like raisins. All shriveled up and cold. All alone._

_-_

_-_

_-_

 

Lunch was nice. Nicer than Ben expected.

 

He sat next to Diego, as Eudora had chosen to sit next to Klaus out of principle. Their history interested him, but he didn’t feel like thinking on it. He couldn’t smell the coffee as it was brought out, or the nice meals that came with it, as the more physical senses (touch, taste, smell) were all reserved for the mortal sphere, but he was practically drooling at Eudora’s perfectly served sandwich.

 

He was content, listening to them talk. It was almost strange, how Diego and Eudora had known each other for so long (and so intimately) but that it was Klaus who led the conversation. The drugs had started to fade, and his words held a genuine weight that seemed to draw Eudora in, and bring a fond smile to Diego’s face.

 

“I will never forget the day that I convinced D-money over here that milk was sentient, honest to god, it’s my best memory.”

 

“You did _what?_ ” Eudora held her intrigue back, pursing her smile to hide the laughter.

 

“He did nothing,” Diego grunted.

“No, no, no. I’d like to hear this.”

 

“Well, she insists,” Klaus joked. He hadn’t touched the food that Diego had ordered for him, but Ben decided to leave it be until later. “So as you may know, I have some _fun_ little spooky powers, yeah? I convinced Diego that the milk was a reincarnated spirit, and that it screamed while he drank it. That I could _hear it dying_ indefinitely in his stomach.”

 

“What did nine year old Diego ever do to deserve that?” Eudora wondered.

 

“Uh, he was always getting me to do stupid things. Like licking a nine volt battery— he said it’d give me pubes.”

 

“Why are you still on that?” Diego groaned.

 

“It was a traumatic realization. I thought I could trust you, bro!”

 

Ben sighed, rubbing the back of his neck with numb fingers. He wasn’t physical, but he had a vague ability to interact with the spiritual world— a place of grey. Their conversation trailed off in Ben’s head, and he looked at the diner without interest. The place looked like it had been built within the last twenty years, by a designer who thought they knew what the sixties looked like. It was the place that could’ve been a Denny’s, if they just added a logo somewhere, but had a certain superiority complex that came with its hole-in-the-wall status.

 

Most of the people that ate at the place were in that range of waning middle age; loud and obnoxious laughs, no longer subject to social norms, apparently (which in itself was a social norm). Diego, Eudora and Klaus were definitely out of place: a military type with visible scars, a clean cut police woman, and their flamboyantly dressed pet, coming down from a killer high. They stood out against the bright red booths, and the bisque stripe of wallpaper that separated the window behind them. Maybe that was why it took so long for Ben to notice the girl next to him.

He sat at a table that had two missing chairs (taken by some family who needed to add a seat to their booth operation). It was empty, until it wasn’t. Because Skye, the woman from the station, sat next to him, blinking the shock from her eyes.

 

She looked at her hands, which trembled uncontrollably. Blood dripped from her no longer corporeal lips. She’d be stuck with that make-up job forever, now. Her eyes moved to Ben.

 

“Where… What happened?”

 

“You tell me,” Ben said calmly.

 

“There was a man who came into the room… Am I…?”

 

“You are dead. Yes.” Ben touched the table, letting his hand phase through. “Welcome to the club.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Ben sighed. “Stay there.”

 

He walked over to the booth, where Klaus was now animatedly explaining the plot of Men in Black, despite having never actually seen the movie.

 

“Will Smith gets all up in—” Klaus cut himself off as Ben approached. “What is it?”

 

Eudora cocked an eyebrow, and Diego pursed his lips.

 

Instead of verbally answering, Ben stepped aside, so that Skye’s ghost was fully visible to Klaus, whose face dropped into a strange in-between of shock and sadness. Pity and frustration.

 

“Aw, piss.”

 

“What?”

 

“We need to get to the station, I think.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Stoner lady is dead.”

 

-

-

-

 

_The missions themselves never bothered Klaus. Sure, he’d rather do just about anything else, but they were always new and interesting, and people would fawn over the Umbrella Academy and its new achievements, holding up signs and screaming chants outside of the crime scene. It was afterwards that fucked with him. Because people died during missions. A lot of them. Diego would spear them through the heart and Luther would throw them from fifty stories up— Ben would rip four guys in half at the same time. For days after missions, corpses would trail behind his siblings, and Klaus found it hard to interact with them._

_Vanya was different. She had a few ghosts, but they lost interest once they all grew older, and Klaus would talk to her when everyone else was surrounded by vengeful spirits. It usually didn’t go far— they were never particularly close— but he could close his eyes while she played violin; those moments were silent._

_Their conversations were often surface level. She’d ask how the mission went, and he’d answer. He’d ask what song she was playing, and she’d tell him. Later on, when Diego and Klaus had grown interested in music, things had gone a bit further than that. He never thought about it, but she must’ve been so happy that they were giving her that much attention, she’d have this sad look on her face when the mission-alarm went off during one of their sessions._

_The closest that Vanya had gotten to Klaus was a few days before Ben died. She walked in while he was scribbling on the walls._

_“Oh, you’re busy— I’ll just…” She moved to leave, but he held up a hand._

_“Nah, you’re good, dude. Gimme a sec.” He finished his sentence and underlined it with a sporadic pattern of dashes. His handwriting was barely legible, but had the personality of a poet. He didn’t have the patience to make it neater, and he already knew what it said. He turned to her. “What’s up?”_

_“Um…” She trailed off, biting her lip. Her bangs covered her eyes as she looked down. She’d started to grow them out, but it still wasn’t at the point where she could tuck them behind her ears. She looked like an extra in the Annieorphanage. “I kind of wanted to talk about something but… you’re the only person I could think of.”_

_“You do have a very wide variety of us to pick from,” Klaus deadpanned. “The only things I’m good at are smoking pot and being exceptionally gay. I do have a killer personality. And I’m modest, apparently.”_

_“Right. Well, I…” She seemed almost overwhelmed by his rapid-fire bullshit. Even after years of living together, none of them could deal with Klaus for a long period of time. “It’s about that, actually.”_

_“My killer personality? Do you need a life coach to tell you how to disappoint Reginald Hargreeves, because honestly we’re all doing that perfectly already. ‘specially you and me.” He absentmindedly placed the tip of his sharpie on the wall, and let it travel along its surface freely._

_“No… It’s about the other thing.”_

_“Smoking pot?” He looked at her with mock surprise. “You can see ghosts too?”_

_“No… Not that.” She bit her lip. There were small imprints along her lower lip, scars from years of uncertainty and frustration. She’d pull it under her teeth in shyness when she needed to sheath her words. “It’s the other thing.”_

_“Being exceptionally gay?”_

_“Yeah. That.”_

_“Huh.”_

_He pat the bed next to him in an offer, which she took, sitting down and gripping the sheets awkwardly. The mattress barely sank in under her weight. It was like she wasn’t even there._

_“I’ve just been thinking and… How did you know?”_

_He shrugged. “I never knew. I just was.”_

_“Oh.” She shifted her feet, before looking up to him with those big sad doe eyes. “What does that mean?”_

_“It means that if you keep… trying to figure it out, you’re not gonna get anywhere.” He really wished he was drunk or high or something for this conversation— but Pogo had confiscated all of his good drugs, and he wasn’t too bad off that he’d start going into his more hidden stashes. “Sometimes you do what feels right, and that’s just whatever. I mostly like dudes, but if I see a chick that I want to get with, I’m not gonna debate it.”_

_“I think that I’m like that too. I don’t know.”_

_“Not knowing is what makes it fun!” He pat her on the shoulder, the closest he could get to genuine. “Do what you want. Love who you want. Be who you want. It’s how to destroy them.”_

_“Who is them?”_

_He just gestured to the thin air. “Fuck if I know!”_

_He didn’t know Vanya. He doubted he ever would. But he trusted her, especially after that._

_That all went away when she published her stupid book._

_Klaus wasn’t one for reading. It wasn’t like he was illiterate, or didn’t appreciate a good story, but it was always hard to focus. When the ghosts weren’t distracting, the drugs were, and when it was neither of those, it was just him. He could read the same paragraph 60 times without understanding what it was saying. Klaus was always elsewhere. So, he had to give it to Vanya: she was a good writer. Matter o’ fact, quick to the point but tinted with this muted color. He could tell, reading it, how she felt, without her actually saying it. The book was engaging. It was also enraging._

_Ben read over his shoulder, and every once in a while, he’d just disappear to take a break from how angry he was. Because Vanya had leaked just about everything. Klaus tended to be an open book, and he wasn’t recognizable enough from his childhood years to get spotted and tormented by enthusiasts, but it hurt. He didn’t want to hear about how she thought he was a “kind soul” ruined by his father’s torture, because he knew that already. She saw each of them as pictures on a wall, without wondering how they were painted._

_He put the book down when he finished it. The NA meeting had already up and left, and the guy that ran it sat across from him quietly, making his way through another cup of coffee. Maybe he should be going to Caffeinators Anonymous or something, instead of preaching to a bunch of addicts who didn’t even care about getting better. Just going through the motions._

_“It’s been an hour since the meeting ended,” the guy said._

_“Don’t you have other people to save?”_

_“This was the last group session of the day. I thought I’d let you read.” He took another sip, licking the milky brown moustache from his lip. “It’s a good book, isn’t it?”_

_“That’s one word for it.”_

_The guy chuckled, standing up to start stacking up the circle of chairs. “I was always a big fan of those Umbrella kids. Always curious what they were like outside of the getup. Sucks to see that they weren’t all sunshine and rainbows, doesn’t it?”_

_“Yeah.” He wasn’t sure if the guy had forgotten Klaus’ name, or if he’d used a fake one for this stint._

_“I wonder if she got permission from the other kids though. There’s some rough stuff in there.”_

_“She didn’t.”_

_“You sure?”_

_“She never asked me, so I’m pretty sure, yeah.”_

_The NA guy stopped for a moment, frozen in place as he stared at Klaus, who just raised his wrist for a good few seconds, showing off the umbrella, stained into his skin forever. The guy exhaled, for an almost inhuman amount of time. “Right. So you…”_

_“I’m the spooky one with a death wish, yeah.” His head lolled back and he laughed at the ceiling. “Want an autograph?”_

_-_

_-_

_-_

 

Her body looked grosser in real life. As a ghost, the junkie girl looked alive past the blood and the sad eyes. But her body was lying on the table at the station with cold skin and a frothing mouth and stiff fingers, and Klaus couldn’t bear to look at it. He didn’t throw up, or anything. He was used to it. Too used to it. The scene was close to home; he’d seen plenty of people die just like that. Shriveled up and alone. Cold. He was always sure that he was next on Lonely’s hit-list.

 

There was a certain kind of nausea that came with understanding violence. A deep seated reluctance that sat, peeking between the joints, like a cold and hostile mold, that built up over time. Life and death met in the middle at a corpse, and it was never pleasant to look at.

 

Police tape was already going up. Diego’s police lady friend no longer wore her smile, instead donning a strict, neutral complexion. It wasn’t welcoming. There was something about a smile, or at least, the ghost of a smile, that could change things. When the sun set on her features, and she saw that her one witness was dead, pumped up with some drug, Klaus couldn’t recognize her.

 

Diego wanted to help, Klaus could see that. He had that look in his eye, that he’d always get whenever Luther got to go first, or when he offered to clean the dishes with Mom. A need to get involved. Instead, he took Klaus by the arm, fingers locking gently in place around his bony elbow, and led him outside to the car. Clouds had gathered around the station, an ominous grey gloom that set around, as if to say that it knew, that the world knew of the life it had taken; a death memorialized by a monotonous weather forecast.

 

“You saw her, didn’t you?” Diego asked, leaning against his car and looking at the sky, as if waiting for it to split open.

 

“What do you mean?” Klaus replied, though he knew the answer.

 

“The witness woman. That’s how you knew she was dead.” Diego held his hand out, waiting for a drop to hit his palm. None did. “Like with Ben. That’s how you knew about him.”

 

“Yeah,” Klaus answered, before pulling out a small red pill. He wasn’t sure what it was. He chuckled before downing it. “Cheers.”

 

“Why can’t you stay sober for more than thirty seconds?”

 

“Why can’t you cook eggs before you eat them?” Klaus lolled his head back, letting the muscles fall limp as he watched the sky lazily. “Seriously, bro, you eat those things raw and its freaky as Friday.”

 

“More efficient. You didn’t answer my question.”

 

Klaus sighed, rubbing something imaginary from his eyes. “For fun, Diego. That’s why people take drugs.”

 

“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.”

 

“That was the point.”

 

“Ah.”

 

They stayed quiet for a bit.

 

The parking lot wasn’t empty, but it _felt_ like an empty parking lot. The way that the wind tumbled over the skin of their cheeks, and that the pavement reflected its own light in a lonesome duet, collecting cars like bricks and arranging them in an un-intimate pattern. Even as people drove in and out of the police station parking lot, and the voices of officers were heard clearly inside, it felt like they were alone. 

 

“You could ask her how she…” Diego trailed off.

 

“I did.”

 

“You could _tell_  us.”

 

“Some guy came in and stuck a needle in her neck. Ironically, she died of a drug overdose. The one she didn’t cause. What a magnificent bird that the world just flipped onto her plate, don’t you think?”

 

“Did she get a good look at the guy’s face?”

 

“I can’t ask her now, can I?” He pops another pill into his mouth, as if it’s PEZ or some shit. “I’m not your Ouijia board, D.”

 

“You were.”

 

Silent again.

 

“Did Dad ever take you off for a solo training session?” Klaus asked, absentmindedly. “Like, when everyone else was just writing essays about criminal justice or whatever the fuck he made us study. Luther told me that Dad would make him do extra exercise or something. We all know what Ben did.”

 

The difference remained that Luther would come back with a sweaty shirt, and Ben would come back with sick skin and haunted eyes.

 

“Y-yeah.” He didn’t mean to stutter.

 

“Me too.” Klaus squinted, squeezing some far away officer’s head between his index finger and thumb, ungodly entertained by it.

 

“Why bring all that up?”

 

“I was just curious.” Klaus’ eyes dart away from his hand to the air next to him. “Shut up, I know _that_.”

 

 Diego had gotten so used to Klaus talking to nothing, that he barely noticed when they were at the Academy. Now, years later, he wonders if it was a good call, not to be concerned.

 

Maybe the conversation would’ve ended like that. Klaus would’ve stuck around for a few more days with his mindless chatter, and Diego would entertain him until he went off and drowned himself in the gutter again, not a single thought spared for the matter. But something stuck out to Diego as wrong with his brother, as if there was a wall that Klaus was trying to climb. A wall that he himself had built. So Diego went against his gut and leaned further onto the car, watching as the sun cut through the cement ground with a sharp layer of gold. He spoke with unpracticed words, words that didn’t have tangible meaning outside of his memory, he couldn’t picture them in his mind.

 

“Dad wanted to figure out how long I could go before drowning,” Diego said, simply. He didn’t stutter, he’d mostly grown past all that, but his lips felt stiff, frozen. Any word could cause the whole moment to collapse: Jenga.

 

“Ah.” Klaus looked down at the ground, in a strange mix of disassociation and deep thought. “Did it hurt?”

 

“Depends on what you mean.”

 

“I get that.”

 

“Do you?”

 

“Yeah.” As Klaus looked into the day, the sun slid beneath his iris and illuminated his face, light pouring over his gaunt cheekbones. He looked like the brightest of ghosts. “Ghosts can’t… They don’t touch me.”

 

“But they do… other things?”

 

Klaus chuckled dryly. “ _Ha_ , yeah. They’re loud as hell, and covered in _all_ sorts of beauty marks.”

 

Diego didn’t say anything.

 

“That’s a euphemism for like… bloody fuckin’ stab wounds and stuff, if you couldn’t tell.”

 

“I could.”

 

Klaus hummed, lazily watching the chaos behind the police station window. “You know what they’re gonna do with her body?”

 

“The junkie chick?”

 

“No, the _other_ body we found.” Klaus said it without malice, despite the sarcasm. His voice open, like air.

 

“We have a morgue at the station. She’s probably en route.”

 

“You say that as if you’re still part of the force, D.” Klaus broke away from the car, balancing his weight, instead, on his right foot, stumbling as he stood. “Which I could’ve sworn was a white lie.”

 

Diego didn’t want to have this conversation with his high brother at two in the afternoon in the police station’s steaming parking lot. He didn’t want to have the conversation at all, but that was beside the point. “Slip of the tongue.”

 

“Right, right. That’s why you hang out here, then.” Klaus chuckled under his breath, “a slip of the tongue. Get a load of this guy, huh?”

 

“I forgot that having a conversation with you was like repeatedly driving a bus into a wall.”

 

Klaus didn’t seem to mind the terrible analogy, shrugging. “I dunno man, it’s been a while, but some things don’t change. You still… brood.”

 

It had been a while. Diego hadn’t bothered to think much on it, but it had been a few years since Alison’s wedding. Maybe it felt like less time because he thought about Klaus more often than he’d like, whenever hearing about a dead junkie over the police scanners. He wondered if his brother had thought about any of them, other than Ben, during his misadventures.

 

“You seen anyone else lately?” Klaus asked.

 

 “One’s on the moon, Alison is in LA.”

 

“Vanya?”

 

“No, but I know what I’d like to say if I run into her.”

 

“Oh yeah, her book.”

 

Diego cocked an eyebrow. Klaus looked at the ground, joint balancing on his lower lip. He had audacity to get high outside of a police station.

 

“You read it?”

 

“Yeah, it was just _captivating_ — they should make a movie out of it. The Oscars would eat it up too— full of all that good fuckin’ drama. Maybe they’ll cast me as Haley Joel Osment.”

 

Diego barked out a humorless laugh. “Yeah.”

 

“She got a lot of things wrong, though.”

 

“Yeah, no shit. It’s not like she was even _there_ half the time.” Diego fumbled around for a knife, fingers itching to spin something sharp. “Did she even care?”

 

“She did, I think.” Klaus pursed his lips. “I _like_ to think.”

 

“Well she has a great way of showing it.”

 

“Yeah, well, we’re not perfect.” Klaus swallowed, waving his joint out and stuffing the rest in one of his pockets.

 

“Yeah, I can see that.” Diego regretted the words before they left his mouth. Klaus looked at him with those pale eyes and Diego could see the walls coming back up, it was almost literal as his pupils dilated down, irises intense as they asked questions of betrayal that Klaus would never ask himself. “Hey, Klaus, wait…”

 

“No, I’m not. I won’t even talk to your junkie corpse, I get it.”

 

“I get that you don’t like to do it— it’s just…”

 

“No I know. You don’t get _why_. None of you DC types would. You’re only scared of things that can kill you.” Klaus took a drag of sweaty air and exhaled, watching his invisible breath disperse into… no where. “Dead people always want things, you know. They ask me to talk to family members or find their killers. Meanwhile, their head is in their hands. Dead people never know as much as you’d think. As Dad thought.”

 

“And you can’t tell them to… go away?”

 

“They don’t do what I say, they’re not like… zombie slaves. They’re people, with lives that were cut short and with goals that they have no hopes of achieving. It’s rare to find a ghost that just wants to chat. They follow me when they find out. It's a whole posse.”

 

“Does… did she want anything? The junkie chick.”

 

“Probably some heroin, I don't know.” Klaus cracked his neck, staring into the sun as if it didn’t blind him. “People like us— like her, they don’t tend to leave this place with attachments.”

 

“Would you be a ghost?”

 

“I _am_ a ghost.” A cloud passed over the parking lot, immediately making the air more bearable, but darker. “Metaphorically.”

 

They all were, but Diego didn’t want to think about it.

 

“How old were you,” Klaus started. “How old were you when Dad was testing the breathing thing?”

 

Random, but okay. “After we figured it out. Maybe I was nine— ten?”

 

“I was eight.”

 

Diego wanted to know what he meant, but he didn’t want to ask. So he settled for saying nothing, and they leaned against the car until the sun moved far enough to the West that he could tell an hour had passed, and returned inside.

 

-

-

-

 

_Klaus first figured it out when he was about twelve or thirteen. It was after one of those lovely mausoleum days, where his fingers were torn by the stone floor, and his cheeks were still sticky with tears. He woke up in the morning with a wicked fever— and while he felt like death, the idea of a break from it all relieved him. Mom gave him some weak cough syrup, the stuff that tasted like sour grapes, and after a few minutes, he felt completely empty._

_The emptiness in question was wonderful. He’d never lived a moment without voices in the back of his mind (literal or imaginary), without bloody faces or a constant headache. The ghosts that lined his walls disappeared as the medicine took effect, and though he was still sick, he actually felt better than ever. He felt bright, his lungs felt lighter and he could just revel in the silence._

_Mom cocked her head, when he started giggling. “You’re quite cheerful, Klaus. Is something the matter?”_

_“No, Mom— far from it.” Klaus laughed again. “Is this what everyone else sees? It’s so bright, when they’re all gone.”_

_She never questioned him further, not really sure what his words meant, but he knew what they meant. They meant more cough syrup. They meant more experimentation— what worked, what kept them away. The more potent stuff came along when they started going out into the world, when older fans would offer him a joint, and he’d comply, because he knew they would work. The world was silent. And it stayed silent._

 

-

-

-

Diego dropped Klaus off back at his place with an order to stay inside. So, he did, naturally not wanting to disrupt the automatic flow of things. Of course, he stole some cash from one of Diego’s drawers, and bought a shit ton of alcohol at the boxing ring’s makeshift bar. The guy at the bar, Al, gave him the most curious of looks, but seemed ambivalent.

 

So there Klaus was, drinking his heart out, and counting out his remaining pills, splayed out across Diego’s dusty couch.

 

He thought about the things he thought about when drunk. Sex, shame, sadness. He remembered his childhood, though it had a glossy, sepia filter over it, his presence in the memories widdled away by each gulp of vodka. He thought about ghosts. He always did.

 

Now, he thought of the ghost with green eyes and curly hair. The one who sang him to sleep. The German lady was nice to Klaus, but she left him alone when he started using. It didn’t dawn on him until later that she was disappointed, and it wasn’t because the drugs clouded ghosts out. He realized, after a while, that any ghosts he actually didn’t mind left once he drowned them out, and all that remained when he was sober were the pale faced, nameless, screamers. So, he stopped using the drugs as a break, and began to rely on them as a crutch.

 

Things got more complicated when Ben died. Because now Ben followed him around like a dead puppy, begging Klaus to get his life together.

 

“Stop drinking, Klaus. You’re about to throw up— well, never mind, you just opened and closed that door.”

 

“Shut the fuck up. Don’t you have some other brother to annoy?”

 

“Well, no. Because I’m dead.”

 

“Right. You’re dead.”

 

Ben groaned.

 

Klaus replied with a pointed look and a sigh. “Hey, you know that you don’t have to follow me around, right? Like, it’s not like you’re using me as a oujia board to talk to our lovely fam-jam, or anything.”

 

Ben didn’t bother trying to knock the glass out of Klaus’ hand, even as his brother downed more alcohol, standing over a pile of his own vomit. It was poetic, really. He’d gotten used to not being able to do anything, not being able to affect the world around him, to the point where he no longer tried. Ben got used to being a bystander. Klaus found it ironic, since Ben died because none of his siblings could do anything but watch— even Klaus, who had to see Ben appear in front of him with a look of confusion on his face, and blood pouring from his abdomen.

 

Ben sighed. “You ever consider the possibility that I care about you, my brother and friend, and don’t want to see you disintegrate like this?”

 

“Nope, never even thought of that.” Klaus ran his thumb over the edge of the glass, contemplating its transparency. “Those sort of things warp when you’re a crutch. Like looking through a… fish eye.”

 

“Who is the crutch here, then?”

 

“We all use each other, don’t we?” Klaus coughed up some stray, putrid vomit, and wiped his hand over his mouth in disgust. “You need to talk to someone, lest you lose your… humanity, or whatever you ghosties do. And I… I need my Jiminy Cricket, I guess.”

 

“What help is an angel on your shoulder if you don’t listen to it?” Ben questioned.

 

“It’s good company,” Klaus answered, simply. “Knowing someone is there to try and pull you back… even if you’re never gonna listen. It’s comforting, I guess.”

 

“Wow, that makes me feel great.”

 

“It’s said with love.” Klaus cracked his neck, rolling his head around to meet eyes with nothing. “You just can’t… get why I’m like this, Ben.”

 

“But I can, Klaus.” Ben ran a hand over his face in exasperation. “I didn’t before, but now I see them, the ghosts. I know what you see, and I know you’re afraid. I’ve seen you in your shadows, and I’ve seen you substitute sunlight with… whatever is easier.”

 

“That’s where you’re wrong. At least you’re dead, when you see them. You’re not… caught in the middle.”

 

Klaus was always in the middle. This limbo of life and death being the most blatant example. But it carried on into the family. They might’ve all been born on the same day, but Klaus was the defacto middle child as they grew up. Maybe it was the numbers, how he fell in between the leaders and the babies. Or maybe it was because he was so easily left behind, even when he had powers (unlike Vanya). He always tried to get their attention, and they gave it just enough to pretend they tried.

 

The first year or so after Ben died, Klaus had stayed at the house (though he was high and/or depressed about 90% of that time). Ben was appalled, at least, he said he was appalled, by the way that Klaus was so detached from the rest of them. He genuinely hadn’t seen it, when he was alive, the way that he slowly slunk into the shadows while everyone else burned each other alive. Klaus told him that it was worse, after he’d died, but Ben wasn’t sure how far that statement could apply.

 

Klaus couldn’t blame Ben for anything. He never could. Because Ben had always been the angel on his shoulder, whether literally or… in a more subtle sense. Ben didn’t show it, probably because Klaus wasn’t sober enough to look, but Klaus knew that somewhere in there, Ben was just as ruined as he was. He knew Ben was literally living vicariously through him, and wondered if Ben’s high came from being Klaus’ constant therapist.

 

But they stuck together. They had to, in such a dark place. There were only so many reasons lying around— reasons to keep going, reasons to smile, reasons to cry. They shared them, and passed them between one another like a cigarette— an ember, desperate against their lips.

 

“You should tell Diego,” Ben urged.

 

“About _what_?”

 

“Anything, really. You don’t have to talk to ghosts to talk to him. He’s alive.”

 

“That’s where you’re wrong, my wonderful Lovecraftian Horror.” Klaus took another sip of vodka, or at least, attempted to, though the glass was already empty. He lifted the glass up, tipping it towards Ben in a mock toast. “See, I’m here, right now, so that Diego can come back and ask me to talk to their dead witness.”  
  
“He cares about you.”

 

“And I care about him. But I’m not gonna keep him around and have painfully deep conversations with him if I don't need him to… kebab a baddie for me.”

 

“Is that what family means to you?”

 

“Well, yeah. It’s what _our_ family means in general. We’re like the Brady bunch… but with human experimentation and a bunch of self-absorbed pricks.”

 

“At least you admit that you’re self-absorbed.”

 

“That’s why I’m not still stuck in Daddy’s castle, so yeah, I guess I do accept that. I mean, we were raised to put our progress above everything, and everyone, else. I may be living the gay, junkie life, but some things stick around.”

 

“Yeah. They’re not good things.”

 

“None of them were.” Klaus smirked. “Except for you, of course, my dear brother.”

 

“Except for me. Cheap words.”

 

“I can’t afford more than that.”

 

Ben sighed. “If you want to leave it behind so badly, why not just help Diego out and be on your way?”

 

Klaus didn’t answer. It wasn’t a hard question, or anything. They both knew why Klaus refused to talk to the junkie girl. He didn’t want to realize how much he was wasting, how right Reginald Hargreeves was— that Klaus was at the whim of his own fear, though the mausoleum was the shittiest, and least effective possible way of addressing it. Klaus didn’t want to feel like he could be more than he was. He liked it, the insignificance of raves and highs and sex. He liked the idea that he could die in a gutter with a smile on his face, and cause no effect on the world around him. The moment he started wanting more, was the moment he’d remember how abhorrently unhappy he really was.

_-_

_-_

_-_

_They were pretty young when Klaus broke his jaw. At first, Diego was elated. Because for once he didn’t have to listen to his brother’s rambling, and he could allot that wasted time to other things. Better things. Like training, or one-upping Luther, or figuring out how to talk without stumbling over the words. However, after the first two weeks, that all changed._

_The silence in the house was uncomfortable, and the absence of Klaus’ mindless chatter was dearly missed. Diego realized, during this experience, how empty their family really was. How Klaus could make up that distance with his words and idiocy. The only sense of warmth in the house, now, was the solemn velvet of Vanya’s violin, still muffled by her bedroom door and interrupted by the mission alarms._

_It was a Tuesday, and Diego was pacing through the hallway. They had an allotted half hour of free time, but he never knew what to do with it. Allison and Luther always went off on their own, Five actually continued his own training, Ben read, and Klaus would entertain himself with music, or set something on fire (at least, before he started getting high). So Diego paced, reading the self-defense instructional signs posted around the hallway, as if they contained something else, some other secret under the surface. He wanted— no— he needed to be Number One._

_He passed by Klaus’ room, expecting to see his brother prancing around in stolen clothes, or humming a tune through the crack in the door. Klaus, instead, sat in the corner, where the sunlight beamed directly into his pale eyes, hands shaking with unparalleled turbulence. Diego thought against it, at first, knowing that he had no place in Klaus’s morbid world, but he found himself entering the room anyways._

_“Are you a-a-lright?” He stuttered._

_Klaus looked up at him pointedly, an unfamiliar grimace on his face. His cheeks shone in the light, wet from so much crying, as if to say_ “ _What do you think?”_

_“D-Do you need… w-want anything?”_

_Klaus pointed to his mouth._

_“R-right, well I can’t g— I can’t g-get you that.”_

_Klaus shrugged. His eyes looked past Diego, now, as if he were having wordless conversations with someone else at the same time. Hell, he probably was._

_“Do… Are there ghosts here?”_

_Klaus nodded, motioning to the entire room._

_“Are they…” He gulped. “L-loud?”_

_Klaus hummed. Diego wasn’t sure if it was affirmative, or accepting. Probably both._

_“M-m-mom says that it helps to picture the word in your he-head.” Diego picked up a stray, broken pencil from Klaus’s desk and handed it to him. “Y-you can write what you want to say down.”_

_Klaus accepted the offer, picking the pencil up with trembling fingers, before nodding. He didn’t write anything down, but he held the pencil tightly in his hands, knuckles bleached with tension. Diego nodded in reply, before awkwardly leaving the room._

_The next time he went in there, words painted the walls. They made no sense, mostly incomprehensible and poetic, like a tangle of thoughts. He wondered if Klaus’s head felt like that, a jumble of mysteries and color, or if it was just frustration prompting it. Diego got his answer when Klaus finally got his voice back, and the words kept piling up on the wall._

_-_

_-_

_-_

            “We’re out of leads, Diego,” Eudora sighed, scratching the back of her neck with a pen. “So if you have _anything_ , I’d be open to hear it.”

 

“Most of my info for this case came from your files,” Diego replied. “No offense, but the locks on these doors are easy to bypass.”

 

“We’ll talk about that later.” She gave him a pointed look, before looking away, tapping her chin absentmindedly with the pen. “What about your brother?”

 

“Didn’t remember anything. He’s the least reliable witness, in case you couldn’t tell.”

 

“What about… how did he know that she was dead?”

 

Diego sighed. “You should’ve read that book, honestly. Though I’m thankful you didn’t— the thought was nice.”

 

“You’re welcome.” She scribbled down a note on her case file. “Before my family moved to the city we’d barely even heard about your family. I know you were Batman in schoolboy shorts, but that’s it.”

 

“Well you know that I can throw knives, hold my breath?” She nodded. “Well Klaus wasn't joking when he said he saw dead people, when he's not high as all hell. He was the first one to know when Ben died— saw his ghost in his room and knew.”

 

“That sounds like… wow.  _Imagine_ if he were a cop.”

 

“That’s what I said.” Diego leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs. “No, but… he doesn’t use it. Or enjoy using it. Before he was crazy from the drugs, he was crazy from the ghosts. I brought it up, but…”

 

“He said no?” She sighed. “I can offer him all sorts of protections— even see what I can do about absolving some of his many demeanors. I was looking at his police record, and it’s practically _Ulysses._ ”

 

“I’ll bring it up, but I doubt he’ll get sober for brownie points from the law. He’s been hooked since we were thirteen.”

 

“Jesus. How’d he even get drugs in your… mansion? Wasn’t your dad strict about that stuff?”

 

“Klaus will do anything for drugs, Eudora. It’s not an exaggeration. Plus, we had quite the fanbase, which was perfectly willing to hook him up with whatever he asked for.”

 

“You both seem so… different from what you used to be.”

 

“Nah, we haven’t changed much. It’s just that… no one ever saw the eyes behind the masks. We were always fucked, Eudora.”

 

She doesn’t say anything for a moment, as if wondering whether to address the words or not. Their relationship at the academy was passionate, and they had an emotional connection that Diego couldn’t deny, but back then, the Academy was fresh, and they’d agreed to let the dog lie for the meantime. By the time Diego could even talk about those days, they’d already broken up.

 

“We can close the case with his help, Diego. I don’t know what… I don’t want to pretend to know what you two have been through, but I don’t want to see any more people get hurt because of this guy.”

 

“Yeah. I know. I’ll see what I can do.”

 

-

-

-

 

Klaus woke up shaking. His head hurt, either from the voices or the hangover, and it sucked serious ass. He reached for his jacket, where he hoped to find some immediate relief, but stopped abruptly.

 

“Oh great. Junkie girl.”

 

She sat by the couch with sad abandon in her eyes, the corners of her lips still vaguely smeared with blood. Maybe she’d been watching him the whole time, waiting for him to get sober.

 

Ben sat on the other end of the couch, reading a book. He looked up to say, “Yeah, her.”

 

“Nice seeing you junkie girl, now it’s time for breakfast…” he reaches, once again for his jacket, interrupted by her voice.

 

“Wait, please! Your name is Klaus right? Can you please help me?”

 

“Yeah, no can do. Sorry. Find another bastard to haunt.”

 

“You’re so nice,” Ben chastised. “To the girl who just died.”

 

“If I’m sober any longer, you’re gonna start making sense, and I’m gonna start seeing some real bad ghosties. So I’m really quite ok with you giving me the stink eye until she goes away.”

 

“Just tell the cops what he looks like for me, please!” Junkie girl pleaded. “I can’t let him keep… doing those things to people.”

 

“You’re already dead, man, what do you care?”

 

“Sincere,” Ben snapped.

 

“Shut up, Ben.” Klaus started rummaging through his pockets, finding a small parcel of… something. “Perfect.”

 

“Wait— please, Klaus. I’ll go away if you… He has one of my friends in his… ring thing? I can’t let her die too.”

 

“If she dies she’ll be with you always,” he sighed. “Not like death is any different from the hellhole we come from.”

 

“Just… can you please just tell the cops?”

 

Ben gave Klaus a pointed look. “If you say no, there’s no way you’re a good person.”

 

“I know. _I know._ Fuck.”

 

“So you’ll do it?” Junkie Girl (he couldn’t for the life of him remember her name) asked. She looked so desperate, that Klaus almost missed how bloodshot her eyes were.

 

“If Diego comes back before I lose my fucking _mind_ , fine.”

 

“Thank you, _thank you!”_ the junkie girl cried: nonexistent tears in her nonexistent eyes.

 

“This isn’t for you, though. Don’t go off telling your ghost friends that I do favors.”

 

“I don’t have any ghost friends.”

 

Klaus shrugs. “I assume most of your friends like the stuff,” he lifts the pills up as a case in point. “Plenty of your friends are… probably dead.”

 

“Not the ones I care about. Not yet anyways.”

 

“Hm.”

 

“At least you get to see your dead friends,” she nodded to Ben, who gave a slight wave. “You probably don’t…”

 

Klaus shook his head. “You grow to hate people when they don’t stop _following you around_.”

 

“Love you too, Klaus,” Ben deadpanned.

 

She didn’t really know what to say. Or at least, she looked like she didn’t really know what to say. For all Klaus knew, she had every word lined up in her head, and they were just stuck there for nobody to hear. He was still alive, but he knew how that felt. All too well.

 

The junkie girl continued to thank him, and eventually sparked up a conversation with Ben about something irrelevant (dead person solidarity, he guessed), and Klaus distracted himself from the other voices by staring at the ceiling. Staring at the mold that grew from underneath the wallpaper, and at the few Umbrella Academy posters that Diego had hanging up in an attempt at decoration. Klaus could never recognize himself on all the merch. His father had made sure that his hair was straight, that his fingers were clean of Allison’s nail-polish, and that no one could see his empty eyes through his mask. None of them looked like themselves, really, except for Luther, who fit the costume to a tee.

 

Diego eventually entered the room, giving Klaus a quiet nod as he sat across the coffee table from him. He took a breath, looking wholly unprepared to start this conversation, so Klaus finished it before he could get the words out.

 

“I’ll talk to junkie lady for fifty bucks.”

 

Diego cocked an eyebrow. “That was a lot easier than I thought.”

 

“Fifty bucks isn’t easy. For me, anyways.”

 

“It’s not like you haven’t stolen more, before.”

 

“You want me to charge double? I can do that. When sad rich ladies come to me to talk to their dead husbands, or at least, pretend to talk to them, I charge mucho moneys.”

 

“No. Fifty is fine.”

 

“Good.” Klaus lifted himself from the couch, giving junkie chick and Ben a less than subtle glance as he stumbled towards the door. “Good,” he repeated.

 

-

-

-

 

Eudora raised her eyebrows when Diego returned not twenty minutes after leaving, with his brother in tow. “I thought you said it would be an ordeal, getting him to come?”

 

“Turns out all you need to satisfy a junkie is a few bucks. Who knew?” Diego sighed, steering Klaus into the interrogation room.

 

“I could’ve sworn,” Klaus guffawed. “That someone just died in here!”

 

“Ever heard of Febreeze?” Eudora snapped, before pasting on a smile and sitting across from him.

 

“So what now, detective? We gonna do the whole twenty questions? Or like… do you want me to get my Ouija board?”

 

“Do you _need_ a Oujia board?”

 

“No, but it fits the brand. People like it better if I have a Oujia board. Makes me seem more… professional.”

 

“You can’t be a professional witness.”

 

“Diego’s paying me to be your witness, so I can proudly call myself just that.”

 

Eudora rolled her eyes. “Ok, so here’s what’s going to happen. I have a sketch artist and some footage for you to identify. We’re pretending that you, in a sudden burst of sobriety, remembered what you saw that night at the motel.”

 

“Ah, but it’s actually junkie chick.”

 

“ _Skye_. But yes. Can you do this?” She sighed in relief when he nodded lazily, though slightly vexed by the carelessness of his posture. The human trafficking and multi-homicide case was a chore, to him. “Do you… do you need to do something to summon her?”

 

“We mediums like to call it ‘conjuring,’ much more on brand.”

 

“Fine. Do you need anything to _conjure_ her?”

 

“Nah, she’s right there.” He waved at the air next to him. “Sup stoner chick.”

 

“Fascinating,” she whispered.

 

Diego piped up from behind her. “Don’t worry, it gets old real quick.”

 

“You’re telling me.” Klaus cracked his neck, and tilted his chair backwards, balancing precariously between floor and table.

 

“I’m going to get the sketch artist,” Eudora finally said. “You’re positive this will work?”

 

“Unless I’ve actually been schizophrenic my entire life, yes. I’m confident that ghosties can talk to me.”

 

“Good.”

 

She ushered the sketch artist, a middle aged, mousy woman with freshly cut bangs and a cheery disposition, into the room. The artist sat across from Klaus, extending a hand to introduce herself. She was used to dealing with younger victims, or traumatized women, Eudora realized, since she’d mentioned that this was a trafficking case. The woman was likely put off by the barely dressed junkie with a vacant stare that now sat before her, going on and on about how the guy’s eyes were more “YA vampire fiction” than “burnt-out boy-band bad-boy.”

 

 

Eudora almost couldn’t see the other side of the conversation, the one that Klaus was having with Skye. However, every once in a while, his eyes would dart to the side, and his lips would perk up slightly. Diego had left the room, presumably to snoop around for more cases to intrude on, so it had to be someone that Eudora couldn’t see.

 

After a good hour of sketch artistry, the mousy woman turned the sketch towards Klaus, who looked at it like a gallery curator, nodding randomly at what observers would call his own thoughts. Eudora knew better, though.

 

Klaus motioned for the woman’s pencil. “May I?”

 

“I’m not sure if…”

 

“Please, _indulge me_ ,” he insisted, voice sultry but effortless as he gently plucked the pencil from her grasp. He quickly added some haphazard lines around the portrait’s jaw. “It’s more like that. Boxy, apparently. Don't shoot the messenger.”

 

The mousy woman didn’t know what to say to that, but finished the drawing off with the extra guides in mind, before leaving it with Eudora to go on her lunch break.

 

“This is the guy?” She asked Klaus, pointedly.

 

“Yeah. According to Lucy in the Skye over here.” He pointed behind him, before furrowing his eyebrows. “That was a genius name, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ben.”

 

Eudora inhaled sharply at that. She may not have known much about Klaus, but she knew about Ben. She knew that he was dead.

 

“Yeah, I did what you asked. Where’d Diego? I need my money, like _pronto_.”

 

-

-

-

 

Klaus used the first ten dollars from Diego to buy himself a bus ticket. Said he “needed some air,” after the whole ordeal, and shipped himself as far away as ten dollars could buy.

 

They’d run the sketch through the system, and it matched up with a few thirty-something white guys with felony records, before Klaus (or rather, Skye) narrowed it down to one. Eudora wondered if there were other people that she couldn’t save, watching her fail to bring down their killers, and Skye got lucky. Though there was plenty that Eudora wanted, or needed, from Klaus, there was little she could do to make him stay (outside of arresting him for possession, which felt wrong, with all he just did for them). Skye didn’t know more than the face of the man who killed her, either. Witnesses with nothing left to see.

 

So, she walked to the bus stop with him and Diego. He talked with people she couldn’t see, promising to never talk with them again. He seemed to part with Skye as they walked, nodding at nothing, before looking back to the curb that he balanced on.

 

Klaus was quiet as he hummed to himself, and even quieter as he waved goodbye without so much as a glance back in their direction. Either the most permanent, or the most open ended of farewells. The door closed behind him, but they didn’t walk away. The bus lurched forward towards the first light, but still, they didn’t walk away. Instead, they sat on the bench awkwardly, with that first-date energy that they’d left behind years ago.

 

“You seem almost disappointed that he went along so easily,” Eudora observed.

 

Diego nodded. “Guess I thought I knew him better.”

 

“You told me yourself— none of you knew each other.”

 

“I just…”

“I know.”

 

“No, you don’t.”

 

“I was just trying to—”

 

“It wasn’t like that. I… You can’t know when- when _I_ don’t know.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“None of us took him seriously, but I always… I always thought he was different. In a good way. Never let Dad in his head.”

 

“He’s definitely… different.”

 

“He let other things in his head, though. And now he’s dead like Ben.”

 

“You don’t really think that, do you? He seemed… pretty alive to me.”

 

“No, that’s not what living is.”

 

“Maybe it is for him.”

 

“For Klaus, living is loving. He’s alive when he cares about something, that’s the only time he’ll try. The only time he’ll really smile. He’s not living when he goes against his own rule for a couple of Jacksons.”

 

“He must care about something, then, if he gave in.”

 

“Yeah, drugs.”

 

“I’d like to think that it’s because he cares about you, Diego.”

 

He met eyes with her for a moment, before staring back at the road, where the bus was already melting into the horizon.

 

“I’d like to think so too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so yeah that happened. I wanted to write some more but it was like 10k already and its midnight so. I thought this was a good place to end it. I wanted like... to have a huge big bro moment but i was like "wait no.. they're still supposed to be estranged here." so that's that. Eudora was so fun to write since she's a mixture of sassy and uptight and it's peak. PLEASe COMment IM desprATE For an Ego BOOSt y'all!!
> 
>  
> 
> I'm actually thinking of writing another TUA fic which is like... real fun. Like think about it. What if the umbrella academy, instead of being 90s kids, were like 60s kids and like fuckin' Klaus gets drafted and meets dave??? idk i just want me a fun klave fic without all the time travel shenanigans that make it hard to elaborate on. so lemme kno in the comments if u like.. r interested in that?? or if u r interested in another part to this fic that is like.. a pseudo epilogue that takes place during/after canon in regards to what happened in this fic. Idk im tired.
> 
> ANyways comment plz i love when people enjoy my work and this took forever lol

**Author's Note:**

> Hey SO I might make a second part where i do some more angsty bro bonding and some closure on the whole lil police investigation if people are interested— So if you liked the oneshot plz plz comment!! Comments are dead ass the only reason I post my writing on AO3 at this point. 
> 
> Also Klaus is so fucking hard to write. Like i swear. I'm usually really great at writing the tortured goof but everything that comes out of that man's mouth is an impossible shitpost. 
> 
> Anyways, lemme know what you think!!


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